Joyce offers us a spatial
imaginary constituted by nested scales. If Stephen’s namesake, the old
artificer, built wings to enable him to jump scales and fly from Crete to the
world, Joyce’s Dedalus scales up as if ascending a ladder. Some rungs appear to
have been knocked out (e.g., Ireland is not nested in the British Empire but
jumps into Europe), but the ladder remains largely intact. One effect of this
imaginative nesting of spatial scales is a multiform localization that
diminishes as one scales up: personal names give way to institutional names
give way to proper names give way to common names. Each named scale corresponds
to a distinct social and institutional form. These nested forms conduct
Stephen’s imagination; they mediate his relationship to the world, generating
relations of responsibility, of debt, of guilt. Portrait of the Artist is, in many ways, a novel about unlearning this
imaginary of nested scales. Thus we find Stephen, at the end of his Bildung, declaring, “When the soul of a man is born in this
country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.” His solution
to this ensnaring is Daedalian: “I shall try to fly by those nets.” Nets, or
nests, those nested scales he had described as a schoolboy? Our young man will
jump scales, leaping from Dublin to Europe, to what passed as “the world.”
Biographical diachrony encourages us to see this movement as freeing; with
Stephen, we shout, “Welcome, O life!” But what if we read these two relations
to space—the schoolboy’s nested scales and the university’s scholar’s scale
jumping—synchronically? What might we gain from thinking together, in a single
moment of social time, the schoolchild’s and the university student’s spatial
imagination? We would gain insight, I think, into how the spatial imaginary
promoted by today’s neoliberal university promotes an irresponsible relation to
the spaces in which the university is in fact embedded.

Where, for example, is the
University of Pennsylvania? The postal address of the English Department shows
the scales in which the university is nested. Abstracting from this address, we
get a sequence of scales that mirrors the spatial imaginary of young Stephen:

Christopher Taylor

Department of English

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

Pennsylvania

United States of America

Every job application I sent
off involved me, in some manner, reinscribing the university—and myself—within
these nested scales. To get to me, letters need to move through the U.S.,
Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia; each scalar mediation localizes me, places me
within that space. Yet, this postal perception of space is discontinuous with
the modalities by which the university produces lived and imagined relations to
space. We might locate Penn, in a formal cartographic sense, within
Philadelphia or even Pennsylvania; institutionally, however, Penn has been
disembedding itself from the pesky scales that get between it and the world.
Like the university student Stephen, Penn tries scale jumping, “fly[ing] by”
Philadelphia in order to directly access the world.

How does it attempt flying
by Philly? On one hand, the university has committed itself to a process of
hyperlocalization—it is committed to becoming an autonomous locale. This
happens through naming (“University City”), through property ownership (Penn is
only growing), and through providing quasi-public “services” (a private police
force). It happens through differentially treating residents of “University
City”: when the racist curfew laws were passed, incoming Penn students who
arrived during the summer who were under 18 were ensured that they would not be
targets of enforcement. We see, then, the emergence of a kind of University
Citizenship, one that interacts unevenly with the bundle of rights and
expectations accorded to everyone in public space. Jurisdictions are becoming
mixed, rules are unevenly enforced, and the protocols of enforcement are not
formal and abstract but stick to particularized bodies. Neoliberal
universities’ privatization of governance results in the neofeudalization of
the city.

On the other hand, this
process of hyperlocalization has its dialectical counterpart in processes of
scalar separation. There is quite literally a western boundary to University
City: if you cross 50th Street, you won’t see any more Penn
security, nor will the university provide incentives to employees to get them
to buy houses. If you cross 50th Street, you’ll be in Philadelphia.
Moreover—and this is the thing motivating my critique right now, and which will
bring us back to the schoolchild—Penn doesn’t pay taxes, nor does it any longer
pay a “voluntary contribution” in the form of PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes)
contributions to Philadelphia. In effect, Penn is so institutionally and
imaginatively separated from Philadelphia that it can choose the precise
modality of its interaction with the city and its inhabitants. It can
voluntarily give a paltry sum to the city coffers, it can voluntarily build a
charter school in West Philly, it can voluntarily criminalize black youth in
the neighborhood—or it can choose not to participate in Philadelphia life.
Meanwhile, city residents living in University City have no meaningful way of
shaping the decisions that Penn makes with regards to their neighborhoods or
Philadelphia more broadly. They’re decision-takers.

Democracy begins with the
co-recognition of one’s heteronomous co-belonging in a given space. It emerges
out of a condition of fundamental non-choice, out of the simple fact that one
is there-with. With a deliberative democrat at the helm, Penn has undertaken
ludicrously anti-democratic policies—policies that rethink the “there” of Penn
in order to hide from view the non-Penn people whom it is constitutively
“with.” This capacity to dissolve the ties of withness, to absolve oneself from
responsibility to one’s given locale, is a mark of neofeudal sovereignty. Penn
is flying by Philadelphia, leaping into the areality of global capital. There’s
no democracy there. And it is this undemocratic disposition that our neoliberal
universities are instilling in our students. Our students fly by nested localities;
they jump from the university to the world. As I said in a Daily
Pennsylvanian interview last fall,
it is unsurprising that so few Penn students participated in Occupy Philly—they
don’t live in Philly, they live at Penn.

Occupying Penn would entail
making Penn institutionally occupy Philly. To do so, we might adopt the
perspective of nested scales delineated by Stephen—not Stephen, the
cosmopolitan university student, but Stephen the schoolboy. We’ve read our
Massey and our Sassen; we know that global capital has scrambled scales and
that nested imaginaries never made much sense, anyhow. But this schoolchild’s
epistemology of space can provide the basis for the polemical demand that Penn
recognize itself as a co-sharer in the city, and act accordingly. And it’s the
Philadelphia schoolchild who might stand to benefit, most of all, from such
recognition. The school district of Philadelphia is about to undergo another
round of neoliberalization and restructuring—66 schools to be closed by 2017,
the wholesale layoff of service union employees, and so on. This is being
passed off as a fiscal necessity. As Daniel Denvir has written, the budgetary crisis could be resolved (thereby
removing justification for the move to restructure and privatize) if Penn could
be made to pay. Penn’s anti-democratic decision to fly by Philadelphia is
helping to perpetuate a social logic in which the urban poor will never have access
to the cosmopolitan university culture—a culture that currently teaches
students, first and foremost, to unlearn social responsibilities that inhere to
the simple fact of being-there-with. The commodity of social-spatial
irresponsibility is expensive. Against the sophisticated analytics that posit
scrambled scales and that provide an alibi for local indifference, we might
discover a politics of spatial re-embedding in the seemingly naïve spatial
ladder of the schoolchild. We might craft nets to catch neoliberal institutions
as they try flying by us into the non-world of capitalism.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Yesterday, at the end of Tom
Corbett’s “conversation” with the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the
moderator asked the Pennsylvania governor what he would say to the protestors
gathered outside. Before getting to his response, two points: First, as demonstrators,
we succeeded in impacting the tête-à-tête between a neoliberal governor and his
neoliberal business chums. Our chants, the pounding of the drums, and the fact
that everyone entering had to pass by us shaped the conversation: our demands
could be neglected, but this neglect would be an active process, the willed
refusal of the governor to admit our claims as deserving response. And so the
second point: Corbett could have
spoken to us, he could have directly dispensed to us the neoliberal claptrap he
would give freely to the Chamber. The governor, it seems, is so taken with
austerity measures that he must also economize his words, his appearances.
Indeed, Corbett (with assistance from the PPD) had to take extreme pains to not talk to us. Protestors blocked every
point of egress from the venue. Corbett would avoid an encounter with us by
exiting through the rear and driving the wrong
way on Sansom Street. (We had this point covered, too, but it was the
thinnest point, and I don’t think people were much up for getting arrested.) So
keep this image in your head: A governor fleeing the people by driving the
wrong way on a one-way street. Against the Einbahnstraße of revolution,
perhaps.

But what would he have told
us? First, Corbett would tell us that our desires are out of sync with
mechanisms for their realization. “They want good jobs,” Corbett said of the protesters. “But they want to tax the corporations. If you ask the business
people here, that’s incongruous.” Tom is doubly stupid here: aside from the
nonsense economics subtending his claim, the desire Corbett ascribed to the
protestors was not, in fact, the desire that brought us out. We were out to
protest a budget that a) slashes funding for schools and b) increases funding
for prisons. If Tom had bothered to read a sign, he wouldn’t have seen shit
about jobs; instead, he would have read any number of demands that we decarcerate
Pennsylvania, fund the schools, and (linking the two) abolish the
school-to-prison pipeline. So Tom ascribed a desire to our protest that we did
not articulate so as to place us firmly in a terrain where neoliberal slogans
might control the discursive field.

Second, after telling us
that we’re all stupid and don’t understand the way of the world like Philly’s
illustrious Chamber of Commerce, Corbett would give moral advice to the
protestors. “I understand that you’re upset because we’ve had to put the state
on a diet, for want of a better description,” Corbett said. “I haven’t met
anybody who likes to go on diets. It is not easy. It is not what we want to do.”
Note how the mood of the utterance and pronominal shifts strive to achieve a
consensus from above. First, Corbett inscribes himself into the utterance: he
hears, he understands, he gets us. Then he addresses us in the second person
indicative, as if we are actually in hearing-distance, as if he actually
addresses us. He then presents an experiential fact (who likes diets?) to
simulate a consensus: thus, when Corbett says “It’s not what we want to do,” it
is unclear if the “we” refers to state agents of austerity or a human
collectivity who hates dieting, a collectivity that would include the
protestors. Corbett’s shifts—from self-representation (“I”) to a particularized
address (“you”) to a generalized collectivity (“we”)—corresponds to the jump in
scale that his metaphor enacts. Really, could the individualized, embodied
logics of restricted consumption that we call “dieting” really be isomorphic
with the logics of state austerity? The metaphor isn’t quite accurate, anyhow.
Dieting is an ends-oriented practice that presumes a quantifiable moment of
completion (five pounds, ten pounds, etc.) Tom’s state now diets for the sake
of dieting and without stating a terminal point. “I will lose x+1 pounds!” swears the neoliberal
dieter. When restricted consumption without end defines one’s mode of life, we’re
not talking about dieting anymore. We’re talking about anorexia, an anorectic
state. The state needs to be as slim as possible, irrationally slim—its bones
jutting out, the fat melted off. Lean unto death.

The fact that Tom’s pedagogy
of austerity is organized by a metaphoric embrace of anorectic
under-consumption is intriguing. Let’s be clear: Yankees are not used to
talking about fiscal austerity. At least, popular willingness to give the name “austerity”
to programs to slim U.S. states’ budgets is, I think, somewhat novel. Austerity
happened elsewhere sometime in the 70s and 80s and 90s, in the Global South,
where IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs decimated post-colonial
social programs that supported social consumption. Our state wasn’t austere—no!
It was efficient, and state austerity through the years of the Washington
Consensus simply facilitated tax breaks that would, in fact, promote
consumption. Indeed, the transfer of wealth from the South to the North through
the Reagan-era and the concomitant availability of easy credit actually
produced a cultural phenomenon of people anxious about the possibility of
consuming too much. (Of course the individual etiology of disordered eating is
way more complicated than this.) The modern figure of the anorexic was born in
the 80s and 90s, the perverse double of those whose consumption was restricted
by state austerity measures. Landmark scholarly and popular research into
anorexia—such as Hilde Bruch’s Eating
Disorders (1973) and Kim Chernin’s The
Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981)—emerged at the
same moment that IMF SAPs were setting off food riots in lands where lives were
adjusted by austerity measures. We might think of anorexia and food riots as
two split registers of by which the possibilities of over- and
under-consumption were managed—utterly distinct, differently impacted by
neoliberal policies and the uneven geography of capitalism. But we can also see
something of a structural link that articulates these practices at a
world-systemic level. The austerity measures in SAPed states induced food riots
that challenged the mechanisms by which capital and commodities flowed to the
global north; anorexia here might appear as an ethical refusal to consume via
the structured starvation of others. And, as we know, both responses to
neoliberal restructuring are deeply gendered, women filling the ranks of food
rioters and (for reasons that are of course irreducible to neoliberal
capitalism) anorexics.

My point here is that concerns
about individual under-consumption in the form of disordered eating are somehow
linked to state under-consumption in the form of austerity measures.
Culturally, Yankees are more familiar with the former than the latter, and for
this reason the latter provides the legitimating cultural logic in which
austerity measures are grounded. (In
SAPed places, on the other hand, austerity has a much livelier cultural life;
see, e.g., Balogun’s Adjusted Lives.)
Tom invoked a “diet” for “want of a better description” of neoliberal reform.
Bullshit: of course other and better descriptions are available to explain
austerity. For instance, the sum total of historical experiences of SAPed nations.
But these experiences, of course, do not in any way legitimate contemporary
austerity measures; they do quite the opposite. Austerity is thus filtered
through the logic of the anorexic because a) gestures to “better descriptions”
based on history would erode the legitimacy of austerity measures and b) as a
keyword, “austerity” has not accrued cultural meanings in the U.S. and so
requires a mediating logic for the ideology of austerity to make sense.
Whatever radical implications the figure of the anorexic might have possessed
are being repurposed to facilitate the legitimation of neoliberal restrictions
on social consumption. Tom probably imagines the dieter, in fact, as an ideal
liberal subject, a good business, one who could hang out in the Chamber of
Commerce: He keeps careful accounts of calories, striving to maintain the
proper balance between debits and credits, always afraid of consuming too much.
The state is incorporating the biopolitical accountancy of the anorexic and
transforming it into a logic of neoliberal rule. We know how to “starve the
beast” because we know how to starve ourselves. If you’ve ever dieted, you can
be governor.

I’m suggesting, in short,
that the cultural phenomenon of (pathologized) anorexia makes austerity
thinkable today. This, despite the nonsense scale jump required to think patterns
of individual action (pathological or not) as the basis for state rule. Of
course, that is precisely what liberalism from Smith through the marginalists
up to today's neolibs do: they isolate a single privileged figure and, through a cursory demonstration of the formal logic impelling that figure's activity, establish the rules for collective activity. The rational entrepreneur and the pathologized anorexic now
form the dual figure that grounds the logic of neoliberalism. We need to refuse
this state instrumentalization of what is taken to be a social pathology. As
someone with a history of (at best) disordered eating, I’m imagining the
formation of a group of ana-anarchists, named “Anorexics against Austerity.” On
one hand, our work would consist in refusing the conflation of individual and
state habits of restricted consumption; our practices of self can in no way
subtend, organize, or provide a logic that enables the state to snatch food
from the mouths of others. On the other hand, we would strive to re-positivize
the anti-austerity social meanings that anorectic practices might once have
possessed. Is there a way of thinking anorectic freedom that does not reinforce
neoliberal ideologies in which austerity and induced under-consumption read as
freedom from the state? I think so. It would take too long—and be too
phenomenological in orientation, too personal—to recover the political
potentialities that inhere in consumption practices that now register as “disordered.”
But let’s recall Coetzee’s Michael K, who refuses to consume as a means of
refusing the corrupted sociality that surrounds him, who refuses to consume
that which he does not grow—but who takes joy in the simple taste of his homegrown
pumpkins, who has developed a mouth for a different kind of consumption. With
Michael K, we see how an apparently anorectic refusal of consumption in one
modality actually opens a space for a different kind of consumption, a
different relation to food—a space, indeed, in which food sovereignty becomes
thinkable, practicable. In truth, we’ve already seen this: life at Occupy
encampments was nothing if not austere, and this austerity involved a reduction
of access to food (no matter how awesome—and they were awesome—the food
committees were). This willed austerity touched on the logic of the anorexic,
sure; our consumption there could only appear as “disordered” to the dominant.
But we can thus see how the anorectic logic of occupation touches on communal
freedom. The very materiality of food—how it was cooked, how it was
distributed, how it was consumed—was present as an object of political
consensus. If the austerity of the encampment can be metaphorized as anorectic,
this is not because Occupiers don’t like to eat, but because they refuse to
consume in some ways and demand to consume in others. The anorectic freedom at
work there did not demand that the people consume less (as austerity promotes)—even
if, in fact, they did consume less. Rather, the anorectically free have
developed a different kind of mouth, new sense organs, a la Michael K: we’re
hungry, most of all, for the political.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

“Occupy love!” So some
tweeted following Obama’s announcement that some of his daughters’ friends’
parents are gay and that he (privately) supports same-sex marriage. But it
makes me wonder (I’m such a Carrie): what would it mean to occupy love? At this
point, the demand that we “occupy x”
typically functions as a call to an affirmative deconstruction: we are to
situate ourselves within the immanent plane by which x functions materially, institutionally, and discursively, and then
expose x’s immanent functioning to
alternative futures. So, to occupy love would be to get a read on how love
functions within one system of predications (the heteronormative system of [neo]liberal
capitalism) and displace these predications. In order to occupy love, then,
we’d have to begin with a simple question: Why are neoliberal states so
garrulous about love? Not just sex, not just reproduction, but love itself?

We have any number of
critiques that demonstrate how love can be instrumentalized by states. It
provides the affective charge that sutures subjects to more-or-less abstract,
ideological structures, affect serving as the conduit by which the imaginary
effectively materializes. But I think that the instrumentalization of love
(whatever form this instrumentalization takes) is simply the way in which
liberal states negotiate the scandal of love as such. Love is scandalous
because it is an act of hyper-predication—that is, it is not simply a
predication such as “x is someone I love” or “x is beautiful” but a
pre-predication that makes x
available for predication, a predication that predicates xas such—and liberal
capitalism treats subjects as thought they are formally non-predicated. There
will always be a deficit of sense between love and the world of liberalism.

Hegel introduces us to this
predicate-less, sense-less, love-less world in his fragment “Love,” composed
around 1798. Opening with a little existential Robinsonade—that is, a tale that
assumes the presuppositions of liberal capitalism as an ontological condition—we
find a non-predicated individual in an alien world. This individual is “an
independent unit for whom everything else is a world external to him”; the
“world is as eternal as he is”; and “objects…are there,” simply there,
horrifyingly bereft of subjectivity, of animation. We see a world of sheer
duration in which this young Robinson can’t seem to inscribe himself
meaningfully; the eternal being-there of the world is impervious to his
subjectivity. Everything—including the individual person—is just stuff,
“indifferent matter.” This is a phenomenological moment, not a historical
actuality; it can repeat itself whenever the world-as-such is not structured as
a horizon of thick meaning, a world in which matter matters indifferently. It’s
simultaneously a pre-historical world and a post-historical world; it’s a world
in which the sense of the world has withdrawn: the world simply endures, and
the individual survives. This individual, who, given the narrative logic of
Hegel, seems like a first-man, a pre-historic man, is just as easily the last
man, the man at the end of the sense of the world, Fukuyama’s hero.

Love saves this individual
from senselessness. There’s a theological grounding to all this, but what is
important is the way in which the very possibility of sensing a sense-full,
animate world is named “love.” Love, Hegel writes, “is a feeling, yet not a
single feeling”—it is not one affect among others, but that which organizes
affectivity in general. Love is the groundless ground by which the world
grounds itself in meaning, incorporating even indifferent matter into lived
meaning. Thus, “in love…life senses life”—a circular affectivity generated in
the circulating love between his couple that has the effect of encircling the
material world in a halo of affect. “In the lovers there is no matter…” By
loving the beloved, in effect, the lover convokes the world as lovable—that is
to say, as sensible and sense-full. So, what Hegel names “love” is a
pre-predicative act that makes the world available for predication; it gives
meaningful being to a world that seemed to resist Robinson’s attempt to find
himself at home there. So, love makes the world and makes it through
another—one-other, in fact. The world becomes senseless the moment the hyper-predication
of love fails; the moment the lover is no longer in-love, the world collapses,
and the lover becomes Robinson again. (This same narrative will be replayed in
the Phenomenology, subbing love out
for labor.)

It’s more complicated,
though. Given the narrative logic of the fragment, it seems as if love (and a
meaningful world) and lovelessness (and a senseless world) are simply diachronically
separated. Yet, there is also a synchronic relationship between love and the
loveless, the intimate world and the worldless world-beyond. The intimate world
of love is always impinged upon by its exterior. These lovers would
like to enclose themselves from the outside world, from the extensive sociality
of indifferent persons and matter from which they emerged, but, in fact, they
cannot: “the lovers are in connection with much that is dead; external objects
belong to each of them.” The lovers don’t halo the world in meaning; rather,
they striate a space of meaning in the alieness of materiality. In effect,
wider circuits of sociality—here metonymized by property—constantly pluck the
lovers from the intimacy of their world. The autology of the at-home gives way
to the heteronomy of the more-than-one, more-than-two.

Certainly, no one is surprised
that the intimate is interrupted by the social. Haven in a heartless world or
not, lovers have to talk about bills. What Hegel outlines, however, is the gap
between the subject and the alien world once love has advened. When Robinson
leaves his lover’s arms and goes forth into the crass indifferent world of
matter so as to maintain his intimate world, what effect will the experience of
sense-full-ness have on his ability to be in that indifferent world? Or, after
Robinson has been loved by another, how are we to treat him, and how would he
treat all the others, the others who are not the one-other? It’s here that love
introjects a rupture in liberal capitalism. As Hegel writes, monogamous love functions
as a giving-over of one’s being to a single predication (being-loved by
another), and this giving-over of one’s being is necessary precisely because
one’s world has no meaningful being without this predication. But one cannot
appear in the world of liberal capitalism as predicated by another; one has to
appear without predications, as a formally abstract person; one has to relate
to all others via mechanisms of sociality that equate equality with
indifference. Robinson’s impossible task: To learn indifference after love…

We know how liberal
capitalism has managed this necessity: through gendered space thinking. The
hyper-predication we call love is denigrated along a gendered axis as merely
private: men in public are formally non-predicated. The masculinity of the
liberal Everybody was a feature of liberalism’s attempt to think pure form
without letting go of a vibrant concreteness it could never directly offer. It’s
not that liberal capitalism does not particularize and predicate subjects—it
does constantly, but always in the name of producing spheres of sociality in
which subjects are freed from such predications. (The neoclassical market is that
utopian place where everyone is freed from such predications, and it’s a
wretchedly meaningless place, of course.) This casts Robinson’s necessary
attempt to access wider spheres of sociality in a peculiar light. Bluntly, the
de-predicating mode of liberal sociality, its freedom, is freeing only in the
momentary affective rush of leaving predication behind—one feels the thrill of
formal freedom…right before one ends up as Robinson again. Tonally, the
technologies of liberal de-predication are always right at the tense excitement
of infidelity: one leaves one’s beloved behind, leaves one’s being-loved
behind, and enters into an anonymous, formal sociality with many-others. An
orgy of senselessness.

Alas, there are no orgies in
Hegel, no scenes in which a de-predicated one takes leave of the one-other and
knocks boots anonymously with just-anyone. No orgies, but there is the state. Indeed,
Hegel will, in other texts, manage the crisis in sense occasioned by the gap
between the world of lovers and the worldlessness of liberal capitalism by
turning to the state as a new principle of unity. He doesn’t in “Love,” though—it’s
a fragment, after all. We’re just left with two lovers, the one and the
one-other, fretting about their exposure to a world of many-others, of
materiality, of the social. We can take it as a moment of potentiality before
the state arrives to manage the crisis of the sense/lessness of liberalism.

So, what’s a lover to do when
confronted with the heteronomy of the social in conditions of liberal
capitalism? Our lover, our Robinson, might attempt to reject the ontological
premises of Hegel’s argument. There’s no reason, after all, why the sense of
the world arrives through one, and only one, other; there’s no reason why the
partition of sociality erected by liberalism should attain such ontological
gravity. There’s really no reason to begin counting at one, with the “individual
unit”; no reason why this one can only interact with the world in a meaningful
fashion when he encounters one-other—and only one-other; no reason why the
persistent interaction with the world beyond these two requires the production
of a third figure that, ultimately, just becomes a new unit, a new one. No need
to begin from the individual, the ego, Dasein, the autos, the ispe…No reason,
no need, except that liberal capitalism is an ontological force, and we can’t
in voluntaristic fashion assemble a new ontology, one premised one the priority
of the more-than-one, the lovability of an open-ended Mitsein. To get out of
the quandary—how does one live liberalism after one has loved?—without calling
upon an apparatus to manage the crisis of sense/lessness, our lover will need
to work with others at learning to love differently. To begin building a loving,
sense-making sociality premised on the more-than-one.

Can we think of Occupy as an
experiment in post-liberal love? Think about the encampments, those bizarre
sites, which—being neither public nor private, neither intimate, nor extimate—take
the more-than-one as its ontological, material, and social constitution. There,
the meaningful world is not accessed through one-other but through constructing
this world with many-others; these many-others can’t be stated in a unifying
figure, but are dispersed in their multiplicity. Perhaps most importantly: the
sense of the world at Occupy is produced through con-sensing, the con- marking
an open-ended set of those who arrive, and arrive such as they are. Echoing
Hegel, we might say that consensing is “a feeling, yet not a single feeling”—it’s
the modality by which many-others make the world sense-full and full, primarily, with the sense of being-with-others.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

“Do we who are to come have an ear for the resonance of the echo, which has to be made to resonate
in the preparation for the other beginning?” So asks Heidegger in Contributions to Philosophy. Heidegger
tells us that we must attune ourselves to this “echo”—a vague resonance of
sound that does not simply emerge from a single identifiable source but that
metaleptically produces a new origin, a “new beginning” from which it emanates.
What echoes is an alternative past that generates a future collectivity “to come.”
Should we not make ourselves resonate with this other-sound, we will simply
hear what we have always heard, accessing the history we’ve always known. We
can take Heidegger’s challenge as a means of rethinking the relationship
between Occupy’s May Day and the whole host of May Days past that resonated
through it. Echoed through it.

An echo, then. Let’s listen, and try to be affected by the
tonalities of an other beginning as they emerge in and through slogans that
seem to have no future. Let’s listen to Robert Owen, and see if his slogan
resounds from an other beginning: “Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation,
Eight hours rest.” Circulating throughout the Atlantic world, Owen’s somewhat
moralistic division of the day would be transformed in the 1860s, when I.G.
Blanchard penned the lyrics to “Eight Hours,” a labor song that would be set to
music in the 1880s by Jesse Jones. Note the difference: “Eight hours for work,
eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” The time of
“recreation” mutates into a period in which laborers’ wills are asserted; it is
formally structured as a time of self-activation. In the U.S., we tend to think
of this time “for what we will” as having been earned in the latter part of the
19th century following a series of mass marches and brutal
repressions (e.g., Haymarket). Whether this in fact happened, whether we earned
our eight hours for self-valorization, the demand is still with us; it echoes,
faintly, up until today, May Day. And the echo changes—its intensity, its
meaning—as it is received within different conjunctures. Even as recently as
last year, this echo was heard in the mode of memorialization—a past with
assignable limits and no future. (I had the fantastic fortune to be present for
the re-dedication of the Haymarket memorial in Chicago.) Today it seems as if
we are hearing this echo as a call to arms, Occupy answering the demand of
those who struggled, and died, for something that many of us take for granted.
Eight hours for what we will.

How to hear this echo? Is it enough for Occupy to inscribe
itself within this history of listeners and actors? Or might we not have to
develop new ears to hear how we might push this slogan in the direction of new
beginnings, and thus futures to come? Let’s be clear: In choosing May Day as a
kickoff date for a spring offensive, Occupy has situated itself within this
ongoing history of labor, within the space opened by the demand that workers
have eight hours “for what we will.” And, in no small way, the slogan retains a
radical force. “Eight hours for work,” for instance, might be a useful slogan
for both affective/cognitive laborers, those whose jobs—like mine—seep into
their lives, into the other sixteen hours, transforming all of life into a
modality of labor. It might also be a useful slogan for those without work, or
those whose work is not understood as susceptible to remuneration: the
out-of-work, on one hand, and domestic labor, on the other. “Eight hours for
rest,” similarly, might not only partition time, keeping sleep free from the
demands of labor—it might also articulate a demand for a place to rest,
for housing security. And so on.

On its own, the utility of the slogan is inexhaustible. But
it seems unclear if we today inhabit the same social ontology of labor that
made this call radical. As a transnationally-minded movement that—at least
rhetorically—situates itself between Wall Street and the Global South, it seems
to me that Occupy is situated between two new modalities of social being that
are irreducible to a laborist ontology. On one hand, finance capital, as we
know, has little to do with the form of capitalism enshrined in the process of
valorization discussed in Capital vol. 1—one that we can
figure in terms of its juridical, social, and political dynamics through the
apparently voluntary contract between labor and owner. Finance is simply the
agglomeration of the power to command that is indifferent to the wills of those
whom it commands; finance does not need to simulate the voluntary conformation of
wills of those whom it effects, be these wills those of individual people or
entire states. We’re talking, quite simply, about a rent-seeking mode of
accumulation articulated to an increasingly feudal power dynamic. On the other
hand, the neoliberalization of the world has resulted, as Mike Davis puts it,
in a billion people being expelled from productive participation (even
exploitative participation) in the world-system. In this emergent planet of
slums, the meaning of labor will alter beyond recognition as we try to get a
read on the new forms of life being produced (or being survived). Labor,
indeed, probably won’t serve as a meaningful category of being-in-the-world.
This is because the Hegelian ontology of labor that programs the social consists
in our ability to separate it from other modalities of being even as we might
recognize the ontological priority of labor as such. Labor, as we know it, is a
term that produces a set (the world) in which it is itself a member (just as,
for Marx, production is a moment incorporated into the movement
production-exchange-circulation-consumption even as it stands outside of it).
Labor, as we knew it, thus engendered modes of being (resting, recreating,
being-for-what-we-will) that are irreducible to it—ending with freedom. But
none of that remains for the world’s abandoned, insofar as labor can’t engender
the separations that made it, for Marx, a technology of becoming-free. Life
doesn’t separate into ontologically thick regions when a survivalist battle
with necropolitical accumulation is the law of the land. Labor no longer
matters, because labor is embedded within a neo-feudal structure of command
that, via structural abandonment, has commanded a billion people to die. We can
get a sense of Occupy’s sense of this dual positioning in the rhetorical
structure of Occupation. Just think: a tent city, a kind of village outside the
castle, forms around Wall Street, and what this village manifests to Wall
Street is nothing but the precarity of life exposed to pure heteronomy, lacking
even the time-honored tool (i.e., labor) to transform this heteronomous
condition into the substrate of a freedom to come.

If this slogan is to mean anything to us, if the location of
ourselves in a history of May Days past is to do anything more than simply frighten
wealthy folks by our deployment of Red signifiers, we need to become resonant
in such a way that the alternative origins intimated in these slogans and signs
echoes through us. And I think, to an extent, that Occupy has done a fantastic
job in keeping the ontology of labor at arms length and in attempting to
develop new modalities of being in the world. Note that, despite the verbal
link, the practice of occupying is discontinuous with having an occupation. (No
one in the future will mark down, under “Previous Employment,” “I occupied!”)
And most of us don’t occupy to gain occupations, either—the social ontology Occupy
thinks, materializes, and materialized from, is post-labor, post-work. For
better or worse, we’re outside of the parameters that made “Eight hours for
work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” a meaningful slogan. So
what remains of it, what echoes? That last bit, that last prepositional clause—provided
that we rip it from its temporal partitions and provided that we attempt
determining relations of work and rest from the perspective of this last eight
hours. An other beginning echoes here, the foundationless beginning of a
self-constituting collectivity that aims only at constituting itself. The irreducible,
aimless circularity of democratic self-production.

What, we will be asked, we have
been asked, we will be asked, are we after? What is Occupy working for?

For all
time to be a period of self-activation. For all time to be for what we will.